EU Rules Digital Games Can Be Resold

Some major news has come out of Europe this week for gamers, with the Court Of Justice of the European Union ruling that digital downloaded games are now allowed to be resold by their owners. The ruling was a result of Oracle taking German company UsedSoft to court for reselling licenses to Oracle products

If you have ever read the terms and conditions we signup to when we purchase a digitally downloaded game, they basically state that we are renting the games over the long term from the publishers, and we have no rights to protect us from the company taking them back at anytime.

The new ruling from the EU bring huge implications for the digital download stores such as Steam, GamersGate and Origin, who will now need to provide a method of being able to administer the reselling of the games we purchase when needed. The preliminary ruling from the Court Of Justice of the European Union states:

“The first sale in the EU of a copy of a computer program by the copyright holder or with his consent exhausts the right of distribution of that copy in the EU. A rightholder who has marketed a copy in the territory of a Member State of the EU thus loses the right to rely on his monopoly of exploitation in order to oppose the resale of that copy… The principle of exhaustion of the distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website.”